Cody plays football but he’s not the quarterback or anything: he’s PK and he’s got a little pothead chin scruff as a badge of outsider status. He is tall, though. And he drives a truck.

Cody wants to be a pilot if he can’t go pro (his left knee shunted him out of soccer). He can play that Plain White T’s song on his guitar but suspects he’ll have to learn a couple more before college. He’s in AP History and he likes the word “cuneiform.”

Cody always liked Annamarie, even when she used to knock him in the playground dirt.

Cards are more popular, but really Remy prefers dice. It took him a long time to become a serious craps shooter, able to spin flat and even hit the wall without changing faces; he particularly enjoys the inevitable accusations of sharking, and the quick and sloppy fights that follow. Dicing requires physical skill in many arenas.

All you need for cards is a grin and some math.

The girl from the supermarket, says her license, is Annamarie. Remy replaces the wallet in her pocket with a queen of hearts in the billfold. He’s got a whole deck of those, but still.

Annamarie works that summer as the cashier at the self-checkout lane at the Winn-Dixie, where she stands at a counter and glances at receipts and politely points out forgotten twelve-packs of Coke on the bottom racks of shopping carts. She swipes her own Lunchables for her break next to the ice machine.

There’s a little TV at the stand and it flickers between cameras pointed out from under each laser scanner, so you can see what they’re trying to weigh as unlabeled produce. It shows faces, too, distorted and bulbous. Every one she sees could be her mother.

Acid, Annamarie decides eventually, slipped into her first beer of the evening. Or peyote or something. She’s never tried any of them on purpose.

“Are you okay?”

The boy with floppy hair eyeing her, whose pink shirt has begun to pulse and race in her vision, may or may not be the one who dosed her. Not that it would avail him much–in fact, it’s almost unfair to let him so gravely misunderstand the situation. She tries to warn him, as obliquely as she can manage.